Vitaliano

“Ciao!” he says, arm and fingers raised in crooked salutation. They create an apt frame for his round head, bent forward and sideways in focused gesture. From eyes that lodge deep in the hollow sockets of a face shaped by eons of trial and toil, Vitaliano looks out at the world.

What does he make of these stranieri, these inglesi, who have begun to invade his land, surrounding him with their blustery exuberance and stone houses renovated to a condition that he’s been trying to leave behind all his life? Why are they here?

Life is hard for him – 70 years old with a frame that’s starting to creak, and still he has to work the land on his own. And yet here he was today, early February, mid-winter, offering us lettuce with the fresh earth still dripping from its leaves. We are neighbours. And as strange as we may be to each other, we look out for each other.

Vitaliano is the quintessential contadino. That means peasant, and in spite of it seeming to rankle of derogation (at least to me), it’s widely used to describe any class of people who are freeholders and who work the land. Their roots go deep into this earth, going back who knows how many generations, and they simply cannot be anywhere else – this is where they belong. It’s as simple as that.

Vitaliano’s house is an unfinished project, beyond his means but not his dreams. Stepping inside it for the first time – which we did to give he and Orellia (his wife) their Christmas gifts (mainly clothing) – it appeared from the state of the kitchen/dining room/lounge as if the plot of the dream has yet to take coherent shape. He was clearly uncomfortable to have us surprise them unannounced, and in retrospect I wish we hadn’t – despite their humble lives, they have a pride which hurts when dented.

When we first met Vitaliano during our September 2005 visit to see how our house was doing, he asked if our offering of chocolate was because we wanted to be his friend. We said yes. I might be misinterpreting his attitude at the time, but I remember it as edged with aggression, given that the previous owner was like a brother to him. But there’s nothing like that now, and I’d say there’s a solid respect between us, each with our own reason and different perspective.

He is nothing if not generous in sharing what his land produces and supports. Last week we ate the pigeons he gave us – plucked and frozen, thank heavens – with a few sprigs of rosemary from the veritable bush that he gifted us along with the birds. (All contadini around here keep pigeons, it seems, as a food source, fiddly and finicky as it is to eat them – for all we know, they’re a delicacy.) We still haven’t made it through his bunch of garlic, and we remember the fall and his earth-caked tomatoes, hand-picked from his vegetable garden. These are the things we came to Italy for.

And then we have our points of departure. Treatment of animals, for instance. Apparently, last spring his dog (Hyena, from a previous post) had four puppies. Vitaliano decided that his environment could only support one. He killed the other three. (I’m not sure how, but perhaps that’s irrelevant.) This is his crude form of birth control. He must have wondered at our obvious grief at Mr Young’s death – he was just an animal, after all.

The most obvious emblem of the contadino is the Piaggio, or cocolore as Maria has named them – 3-wheeled scooter bugs made by Ape (pronounced “ah-peh”) with one seat in the semi-open “cab” in the front, and a small open pickup-type bed on the back. Seeing them buzzing – “buzz” being used here to convey sound rather than speed – with a laboured whine on the curving roads is confirmation that you’ve arrived in rural Italy. Like their brethren Vespa, buzz-thing of the Italian urbanite, cocolore are veritable institutions for the contadini who putt-putt around in them from farm to market to church to neighbour.

Vitaliano, of course, has one. It’s his only form of transport, frequently getting him and his wife Orellia all the way to Tolentino and back. Seeing the two of them spilling out of its open sides triggers thoughts of scenes from some sort of weird, creepy movie (The Twilight Zone springs to mind). Massimo, their bus-driver son, has a car, but I’ve only ever seen Orellia in it once, and never Vitaliano.

Massimo, a miniature version of Vitaliano, bald spread and all, spends a few nights a week here. He recently sold his Mercedes to an Albanian – it had 600,000 km on the clock. I wonder what he got for it. Sometimes he brings the bus over to get an early start in the morning for one of his longer trips to Paris, Stuttgart, or other distant destination. It adds to the surreal picture seeing the luxury Pullman standing next to an unfinished contadino house with its requisite cocolore standing outside.

Regnano’s little microcosm has taught me never to be surprised at what you might find here. Naturally, I still am. I wonder how we contribute to its flavour – I sincerely hope it’s in some tasty way. It is certainly changing – with an English couple, an Australian couple, and a South African-German-American family all within eyeshot of each other, how can it not? But here’s a hope – that we don’t change Vitaliano and his values, and if we affect his life at all, that it’s in a positive way.